WEBVTT NOTE Barbed Wire Security and the Heart of the Modern State: The Origins of Mass Internment, 1895-1933 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.440 In its heart, the state perceives and records, not in units of human beings, but in bodies, 2 00:00:07.440 --> 00:00:13.440 categories, classes, groups. One of the most important categories invented by the modern 3 00:00:13.440 --> 00:00:20.080 state is the category enemies. Even in its infancy in the 1400s and 1500s, the modern 4 00:00:20.080 --> 00:00:25.280 state was ringed about with foreign enemies and permeated with internal enemies, as Machiavelli 5 00:00:25.280 --> 00:00:33.160 makes clear. By the 19th century, Western powers had decided that birth in the territories 6 00:00:33.160 --> 00:00:39.240 of a different state was enough to qualify one as an enemy. The decisions of the state 7 00:00:39.240 --> 00:00:43.960 in whose territories these people had left suddenly defined them in their new home, that 8 00:00:43.960 --> 00:00:52.560 is, as enemy aliens. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, from Central to Western Europe, 9 00:00:52.560 --> 00:00:58.160 In North America and in Australia and New Zealand, the fate of a host of people, designated 10 00:00:58.160 --> 00:01:03.640 as enemy aliens, was internment behind barbed wire. 11 00:01:03.640 --> 00:01:10.200 That the 20th century added barbed wire to the arsenal conceived by Machiavelli is a 12 00:01:10.200 --> 00:01:11.800 commonplace. 13 00:01:11.800 --> 00:01:17.700 Barbed wire has been the indispensable tool of the modern state, from Dachau to Guantanamo. 14 00:01:17.700 --> 00:01:22.080 But it's perhaps not so common knowledge that virtually every belligerent power in World 15 00:01:22.080 --> 00:01:27.800 War I locked up enemy aliens behind barbed wire in internment camps that ruined individuals 16 00:01:27.800 --> 00:01:32.640 and families and blazed the trail for the vast concentration camps of Hitler and Stalin 17 00:01:32.640 --> 00:01:39.400 and beyond. Barbed wire, you might say, both focuses and symbolizes the violence that backs 18 00:01:39.400 --> 00:01:46.640 the theory and practice of the modern state. The invention of barbed wire in the 1870s 19 00:01:46.640 --> 00:01:52.800 opened up whole new vistas for the state. I've written about the invention of the barbed wire 20 00:01:52.800 --> 00:02:00.320 concentration camp by the Spanish, British, and Americans between 1895 and 1907 in wars of empire 21 00:02:00.320 --> 00:02:06.400 in Cuba, South Africa, and the Philippines. But I recently began working on the next chapter, 22 00:02:06.400 --> 00:02:12.560 internment camps of enemy aliens during World War I. Almost everybody knows about the American 23 00:02:12.560 --> 00:02:17.760 and Internment of Japanese in the Second World War, but few are aware of the continuous history 24 00:02:17.760 --> 00:02:25.360 of internment from 1914 onward. Today I will limit myself mainly to the European powers 25 00:02:25.360 --> 00:02:30.600 in World War I, indeed mainly to the Entente powers. You remember who that was. That was 26 00:02:30.600 --> 00:02:38.720 the side that made the world safe for democracy. The moment the war broke out in August 1914, 27 00:02:38.720 --> 00:02:45.700 The British government targeted resident individuals entirely legal who had not applied for naturalization 28 00:02:45.700 --> 00:02:52.360 and were aliens. Most of the male enemy aliens in Britain were slated for internment. I will 29 00:02:52.360 --> 00:02:58.720 tell something about this program by means of an example. Let us say a German craftsman, 30 00:02:58.720 --> 00:03:05.000 a commercial embroiderer perhaps, moves to England to set up shop around 1900. He does 31 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:10.760 has good business, makes a good living, meets an English girl, marries her, has some children. 32 00:03:10.760 --> 00:03:15.640 In an age before passports and green cards, he's enthusiastic about Great Britain, but 33 00:03:15.640 --> 00:03:22.280 he never sees a need to formalize his status as a British subject. True, the category of 34 00:03:22.280 --> 00:03:28.120 enemy aliens exists in law at this point, but it's likewise true that Britain has for 35 00:03:28.120 --> 00:03:33.320 a century given up persecuting those resident civilians whose home country is a belligerent 36 00:03:33.320 --> 00:03:39.040 of Country on the opposite side in some war or other. Hence, our tradesman in London goes 37 00:03:39.040 --> 00:03:44.160 blithely on without noticing the increasingly careful efforts that European governments 38 00:03:44.160 --> 00:03:51.520 are taking to categorize battlefield enemy competence, to categorize wounded enemy soldiers, 39 00:03:51.520 --> 00:03:56.840 captured enemy soldiers, enemy civilians who do what they are told by the invading army, 40 00:03:56.840 --> 00:04:02.680 enemy civilians who put up resistance to invaders, etc. There are suddenly rules and identifications 41 00:04:02.680 --> 00:04:11.040 Then the war broke out on August 4th, 1914, and by the end of the month, enemy aliens were 42 00:04:11.040 --> 00:04:16.520 already being rounded up. Some had already reached the Isle of Man in the middle of the 43 00:04:16.520 --> 00:04:22.480 Irish Sea by the end of August. But back to our tradesman, whom I might as well name since 44 00:04:22.480 --> 00:04:27.740 he was a real person whose records I looked at in September on the Isle of Man. He was 45 00:04:27.740 --> 00:04:41.900 Max Gotzhalt found himself arrested and transported to the Isle of Man. There were many internment 46 00:04:41.900 --> 00:04:46.980 camps in the UK during the war, but the most permanent was the Nak'Elo camp on the Isle 47 00:04:46.980 --> 00:04:54.340 of Man. This internment camp sprang up on pasture land, just over a ridge, on a kind 48 00:04:54.340 --> 00:05:22.640 Fickla and her four children tried to maintain the family business, and Max attempted to 49 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:27.640 to coordinate things from NACALO, but all communications were by letter. 50 00:05:27.640 --> 00:05:32.640 Sensors confiscated many of them, so Max and Thecla were never sure which letter had made it. 51 00:05:32.640 --> 00:05:39.640 Thecla both took care of the children and tried to run the small embroidery workshop business. 52 00:05:39.640 --> 00:05:45.640 No one could predict either the length of the war or the length of internment, so planning was short-term at best. 53 00:05:45.640 --> 00:05:50.640 As the war dragged on, Max instructed Thecla to cut corners in various ways, 54 00:05:50.640 --> 00:05:58.400 make specific deals with various vendors and factories, and finally to sell off some of the embroidery machines. 55 00:05:58.400 --> 00:06:07.440 By 1917, Thekla hardly had food for her children. She sent a few parcels to Max at Nakelo, 56 00:06:07.440 --> 00:06:13.560 but he always reprimanded her since he couldn't stand for the children to go hungry. 57 00:06:13.560 --> 00:06:18.160 Her dealings were triply difficult. Since she was married to an enemy alien, 58 00:06:18.160 --> 00:06:23.680 A ruling of the authorities made her an enemy alien too. So English-born, she was ruled 59 00:06:23.680 --> 00:06:29.920 to be an enemy alien. She got help from no one. The war ended, but the worst was yet to 60 00:06:29.920 --> 00:06:36.520 come. The British government decided that most of the enemy aliens would be returned 61 00:06:36.520 --> 00:06:42.280 to their country of origin. Max was among the vast majority who were, going right from 62 00:06:42.280 --> 00:06:48.580 from the camp directly to Germany, except that Germany was starving because of the illegal 63 00:06:48.580 --> 00:06:54.720 British hunger blockade of all goods throughout the war. Some 800,000 German civilians would 64 00:06:54.720 --> 00:06:59.080 die of starvation during the war and its weight. The economy was chaos, there was violence 65 00:06:59.080 --> 00:07:03.760 in the streets, the currency was being destroyed by inflation, and Max's family didn't go 66 00:07:03.760 --> 00:07:20.760 He wrote a few letters from Germany, but by 1921, he was asking Thekla to avoid describing his family's plight since he could do nothing about it anyway, and he just could not bear to know about it. 67 00:07:20.760 --> 00:07:27.760 His letters from Germany stopped coming in 1921, and Thekla never heard from him again. 68 00:07:27.760 --> 00:07:34.920 Here is a single tragic experience of a few individuals, and there were millions of such 69 00:07:34.920 --> 00:07:38.600 stories in the world from 1914 onward. 70 00:07:38.600 --> 00:07:43.840 A short listing gives some idea of the magnitude of the state's internment of enemy aliens 71 00:07:43.840 --> 00:07:50.480 and a related but much more useful category that emerged rapidly, undesirable persons. 72 00:07:50.480 --> 00:07:56.080 France ran a string of internment camps throughout World War I that, as we'll see, went into 73 00:07:56.080 --> 00:08:00.880 of the Postwar Period, both military and civilian POWs, as they said. 74 00:08:00.880 --> 00:08:05.920 Canada interned thousands of enemy aliens, mainly Ukrainians. 75 00:08:05.920 --> 00:08:11.320 Australia interned all persons, citizens or not, who were of German descent. 76 00:08:11.320 --> 00:08:16.640 In the United States, with half a million Germans and three million aliens who came 77 00:08:16.640 --> 00:08:20.480 from Austria-Hungary, only those suspected of being dangerous were interned. 78 00:08:20.480 --> 00:08:35.160 Well, the war ended in November 1918 and the camps were slowly dismantled. Families and 79 00:08:35.160 --> 00:08:42.680 lives had been destroyed, but there were other tragic repercussions as well. The ideas of 80 00:08:42.680 --> 00:08:47.480 internment flourished. The Bolsheviks may not have invented the concentration camp, 81 00:08:47.480 --> 00:09:14.960 I'm still in the beginning phases of the larger project that I'm working on, but some characteristics 82 00:09:14.960 --> 00:09:24.220 One point seems obvious, but I'd like to state it clearly. The whole process of internment 83 00:09:24.220 --> 00:09:30.800 was a process related to war. These camps were invented because of war and inside of 84 00:09:30.800 --> 00:09:37.280 war. And the whole progeny of internment camps, concentration camps, refugee camps, all of 85 00:09:37.280 --> 00:09:42.560 those, would be a product of war, and especially the war of the state against its internal 86 00:09:42.560 --> 00:09:52.380 Another point is that the state tended to recycle its war-related properties. One prominent 87 00:09:52.380 --> 00:10:00.240 example of this is the real estate that was the site of the first and most important Nazi 88 00:10:00.240 --> 00:10:06.520 concentration camp, Dachau. As a developed landscape outside of the town of Dachau, just 89 00:10:06.520 --> 00:10:12.020 north of Munich, the Dachau site began life not as an internment camp in World War I, 90 00:10:12.020 --> 00:10:18.140 in WWI as a munitions plant. Hence it was a place where there was plentiful state investment, 91 00:10:18.140 --> 00:10:26.340 there was this war industry, etc. And the land belonged to the Bavarian state, partly 92 00:10:26.340 --> 00:10:31.980 to the German state. After 1918, the factory closed and the out-of-work thousands contributed 93 00:10:31.980 --> 00:10:37.540 to the highest unemployment of any city in post-war Germany. Indeed, when Hitler came 94 00:10:37.540 --> 00:10:44.920 came to power in 1933. The first Nazi goal was to identify the enemies of the state and 95 00:10:44.920 --> 00:10:50.860 lock them up. The lands of the Dachau Munitions Plant, long deserted, presented themselves 96 00:10:50.860 --> 00:10:57.740 as a perfect solution. Large area, already surrounded by barbed wire, some existing buildings, 97 00:10:57.740 --> 00:11:06.860 a huge workforce of guards, plumbers, truck drivers, etc. That was in 1933. Hence, there 98 00:11:06.860 --> 00:11:12.320 There was a kind of recycling of state properties from munitions plant, in this case the concentration 99 00:11:12.320 --> 00:11:18.140 camp. But these are institutions that are in many ways related to each other. This recycling 100 00:11:18.140 --> 00:11:22.480 aspect is important, I think, because for all of the state's inefficiencies, or maybe 101 00:11:22.480 --> 00:11:27.080 I should say this, perhaps because of the state's inefficiencies, this recycling has 102 00:11:27.080 --> 00:11:33.740 been not only a prominent feature of many internment camp stories, but also a driving 103 00:11:33.740 --> 00:11:40.260 As in the case of Dachau, the existence of the internment enclosures have also seemed 104 00:11:40.260 --> 00:11:46.760 to suggest to the state further internment of this enemy or that. 105 00:11:46.760 --> 00:11:51.380 In connection with this recycling process, as I'm calling it, the most striking part 106 00:11:51.380 --> 00:11:55.340 of my search has to do with the network of interrelated internment camps in southern 107 00:11:55.340 --> 00:11:57.300 France. 108 00:11:57.300 --> 00:12:01.720 Much of the original documentation on these camps is either missing or still secret, so 109 00:12:01.720 --> 00:12:07.160 So my research with these has so far consisted more in establishing a kind of spatial understanding 110 00:12:07.160 --> 00:12:14.400 of this network of camps. To do this I went to southern France to a region along the Mediterranean 111 00:12:14.400 --> 00:12:20.160 just north of the Franco-Spanish border in one of the areas pictured a moment ago. It 112 00:12:20.160 --> 00:12:25.760 was still Spain back then but it's in France now. And my wife Karen and I visited a number 113 00:12:25.760 --> 00:12:55.760 A military barracks had already existed from about 1937 when the 114 00:12:55.760 --> 00:13:06.760 In 1938, the French began to intern masses of Spanish refugees fleeing Franco's forces. 115 00:13:06.760 --> 00:13:12.540 These undesirable aliens were the first internees, but not the last by a long shot. 116 00:13:12.540 --> 00:13:19.160 In only a year or so, the remaining undesirable aliens were joined by enemy aliens from throughout 117 00:13:19.160 --> 00:13:20.160 France. 118 00:13:20.160 --> 00:13:25.540 That would be Germans and others because the Germans and the French went to war. 119 00:13:25.540 --> 00:13:32.980 As in Dachau in 1933, the camp was great for the local economy. Local people found work 120 00:13:32.980 --> 00:13:37.960 as guards, cooks, truck drivers, guard tower carpenters and whatnot. A kind of a French 121 00:13:37.960 --> 00:13:47.200 New Deal. But France fell to Germany in 1940 and under the peculiar rules of the occupation 122 00:13:47.200 --> 00:13:53.060 regime the camp began to receive a new category of undesirable aliens, namely Jews on the 123 00:13:53.060 --> 00:13:58.920 The Run from Nazis who made it in some way to France or to some place where they were 124 00:13:58.920 --> 00:14:03.660 captured by the French. Also gypsies were put there along with the others, many of whom 125 00:14:03.660 --> 00:14:10.140 were still there. Both groups, both of these undesirable alien groups were later transported 126 00:14:10.140 --> 00:14:17.180 to the terrible French concentration camp at Drancy and the survivors thence to Auschwitz. 127 00:14:17.180 --> 00:14:23.020 But wait, there's more. Liberation and these camps revive. No doubt, same camp guards. 128 00:14:23.020 --> 00:14:28.540 As German POWs are now put there along with some undesirable displaced persons. But this 129 00:14:28.540 --> 00:14:36.540 can only go on for so long and by 1950 the POWs go home. But wait, there is more. In Algeria 130 00:14:36.540 --> 00:14:43.340 the Dirty War happens in the late 50s. France gets out of Algeria. The French settlers, 131 00:14:43.340 --> 00:14:49.060 the Pied Noirs, have a very difficult time coming home. But they're French. Those Muslim 132 00:14:49.060 --> 00:14:54.380 Some Algerians, the Harkis, who were on the French side in the dirty war, fled to France, 133 00:14:54.380 --> 00:14:56.260 where else, and where to put them. 134 00:14:56.260 --> 00:14:59.660 How about the concentration camp huts at Reef Salt? 135 00:14:59.660 --> 00:15:05.540 So from 1962 to 1977, there are families of Harkis eking out some kind of existence there, 136 00:15:05.540 --> 00:15:08.020 something like a Palestinian refugee camp. 137 00:15:08.020 --> 00:15:09.520 Then that was liquidated. 138 00:15:09.520 --> 00:15:11.660 But wait, there's more. 139 00:15:11.660 --> 00:15:18.740 French Middle East policy led France to some odd choices, and in the 80s, they pulled a 140 00:15:18.740 --> 00:15:24.740 The group of Kurdish refugees out of either Turkey or Iraq. Where to put them? Well, you guessed it. 141 00:15:24.740 --> 00:15:33.740 So this group was added, and then later some more illegal aliens from the 1986 terrorist swoops that France made. 142 00:15:33.740 --> 00:15:40.740 This camp was finally ended, finally relocated, 2007. 143 00:15:40.740 --> 00:15:47.740 To conclude, the state invents this institution of locking up large numbers of people. 144 00:15:47.740 --> 00:15:52.480 Now, barbed wire made it all possible in the late 19th century, and the state, in its 145 00:15:52.480 --> 00:15:56.740 uneconomic way, achieves this recycling of facilities. 146 00:15:56.740 --> 00:16:01.620 Uneconomic, but by a certain logic, adept and inventive. 147 00:16:01.620 --> 00:16:09.940 When my wife and I visited the most derelict sections of the Reeves Salt Camp last November, 148 00:16:09.940 --> 00:16:14.940 we wandered around speechless, desolation all around as far as you could see, ruined huts 149 00:16:44.940 --> 00:16:52.940 And the barbed wire is not merely the tool of the modern state. The barbed wire is in its heart.